The astonishing landscape of the planet Mars
could force a reevaluation of all popular ideas about the planet.
Yet even its most “improbable” geology finds a unified explanation
in the electric discharge hypothesis.

From the first
glimpses of the Martian surface, the planet revealed one paradox
after another. Images of Mars did not fit the textbook picture of a
cold and inactive rock ever-so-slowly peppered by random impacts.

Planetary
scientists responded by applying two assumptions, both of them
formulated long before the space age began and long before the
onrush of new evidence pointing to electricity’s influence on
galactic, stellar, and planetary evolution. They assumed that Mars
has moved on a stable orbit for billions of years. And they assumed
that present geologic processes on Earth are the key to
understanding Martian history.

Both
assumptions must now be abandoned because new discoveries contradict
them. But it is unlikely that planetary scientists will see the
evidence until they stop projecting prior theoretical models onto
Mars and give adequate attention to the detailed images, now in
hand, that simply do not fit traditional preconceptions.

Another view
of Mars is possible, and its contrast with popular ideas about Mars
could not be starker. The new vantage point arises from a
convergence of scientific and historical investigation. Two
individuals who have helped to lead the way in this are David
Talbott and Wallace Thornhill, co-authors of Thunderbolts of
the Gods.
Both
were inspired decades ago by the work of Immanuel Velikovsky, author
of the 1950 bestseller Worlds in Collision. Talbott was the
founder and publisher of the ten-issue groundbreaking series,
“Immanuel Velikovsky Reconsidered,” in 1972. He later authored a
book, The Saturn Myth (Doubleday, 1980), proposing a
“catastrophist” approach to world mythology. As early as the 1960s,
Australian physicist Thornhill, following the lead of Velikovsky
(and later Velikovsky’s close colleague Ralph Juergens), began a
lifelong investigation of electricity in the cosmos. Talbott and
Thornhill first met and talked for several hours at an international
conference on Velikovsky’s work in 1974. For years after that
meeting they pursued their investigations separately, each largely
unaware of the other’s work. Then, in 1997, they began a
collaborative approach in concert with many other contributors, some
of whom are included as editors of these pages.

The authors of
Thunderbolts contend that an “intellectual tsunami may be
necessary to shake planetary science out of a decades-long stupor”.
For this purpose, Mars could be the best provocation, since,
according to Talbott and Thornhill, every square mile of Mars shouts
the same message: From pole to pole, the surface of the planet has
been sculpted by electric discharge.

The picture
above was returned by the Mariner 4 probe as it approached Mars in
1965. It shows Valles Marineris, a giant trench more than 3000 miles
in length. What event cut this monstrous chasm on Mars? Planetary
scientists first thought water erosion was the agent, but that
interpretation collapsed in the face of higher resolution images.
Now some speak of surface spreading and rifting. But here, too, one
need only examine pictures closely to exclude the interpretation.
The defining features show no surface spreading. Detailed close-ups
show that the force creating the chasm scooped out and removed
the material—a fact clearly evident along the neatly machined
“tributaries” all the way up to their rounded terminations. The
result of the event was a continental scale trench equivalent to
hundreds of Grand Canyons. (Readers will want to keep an eye out for
our forthcoming Picture of the Day on Valles Marineris.)

Every textbook
on Mars will tell you that Olympus Mons, a giant mound dwarfing
Mount Everest, is a “shield volcano”. And no doubt that
interpretation seemed obvious when NASA scientists received the
first images of the towering formation. But again, the defining
features of Olympus Mons and its counterparts on the Tharsis
bulge cannot be found on shield volcanoes on Earth: The shallow,
superimposed flat-bottomed calderas at the summit, the finely
filamented “mane”
of channels radiating from the summit, the steep escarpment, the
depressed terrain surrounding the escarpment, the concentric ridges
and valleys in the mysterious “aureole”—all are diagnostic of a
single phenomenon: an electric discharge impinging on an anode, or
positively charged surface. The fundamental structure of Olympus
Mons can be
replicated in the laboratory.

Of course, the
phrase “electric discharge” has yet to enter the lexicon of Martian
geology—or astronomy for that matter. Fundamental shifts in
theoretical perspective do not come quickly. But one advantage of
the electrical interpretation is that its implications are both
sweeping and testable. The electric theorists claim that all
of the primary patterns of Martian geography are replicable by
electric discharge. In contrast, they argue, close inspection of the
planet’s surface features will, in every significant case, refute
NASA’s contrived and often contradictory “explanations”.